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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: JetBSD and SharkBSD???
Message-ID: <haley.753308115@scws3>
From: haley@scws3.harvard.edu (Elizabeth Haley)
Date: 14 Nov 93 20:15:15 GMT
Organization: Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Summary: What's going on???
NNTP-Posting-Host: scws3.harvard.edu
Lines: 77
Once again, it seems that it is time for people to be generally angry
at each other.
Why?
Jordan implies that there will be no merger between the NetBSD and
FreeBSD groups because of fundamental differences of opinion. But NOT
about technical issues???????
Why?
I can understand if the two groups have different design philosophies,
there is a very wide range of overall objectives for an OS.
But if it is not about technical issues other candidates are funding
(which appears to be mostly non-existant in both cases) or political.
Though I can't imagine what kind of political difference there could
be to spark this kind of anger.
I can't help wondering if this fight has to do with what end of the
egg you crack in the morning.
Chris implied that unnamed members of the FreeBSD were grabbing code
and installing it without testing...
This, in my estimation, is cause for laughter, not anger. What do you
care if someone uses your code wrongly, if it is not directly hurting
you?
Since no-one, as far as I can tell, is living off of the proceeds of
this project, why is anyone acting as if the food is being taken out
of his/her mouth? This isn't life and death. This isn't survival. This
is a nice community project, in a community that is well equipped to
judge what's good and what's bad: If it works, it's good.
All this fighting is VERY ugly, especially now that it is in the
public eye.
I, for one, am merely looking for an OS where I can write a few
programs, get some of my other computer work done, and be relatively
confidant that my system won't freak out on me in ways I can't deal
with.
My 4M 386DX-40 with NO FPU has NEVER crashed. Not with 386bsd-0.1, not
with PK-2, 2.3 or 2.4, not even through a screwed up installation of
FreeBSD, (which is as much my fault, with a faulty version of gcc, as
it was the bug I helped point out) or the installation of NetBSD,
which I decided to check out.
My experiences with commercial OSes has been that MAC OS dies
regularly, MS-DOS dies about a third as much as Mac OS, and Sun OS
seems to be very good at dying whenever the sys-admin has gone home
for the weekend. The Only OS that has had the kind of stability of
386bsd and it's derivatives was HUX from Harris Corp, running on a
HCX-9, which never crashed because of a software fault, and recovered
from someone flipping on the write-protect switch on the /usr volume
pretty much instantly after I turned it off again. That computer
unfortunately cost about $30,000 a year in maintanence plan costs,
whereas my little box cost me about $1200 plus a big box of blank
disks.
Clearly the systems work pretty well. If there are design philosophy
differences, great, vive la difference. If you think the other system
is a lose, fine, but keep it to yourself. Regardless of what you know
about the situation, and what I don't know about it, it all looks very
petty from this side of the screen, which I sure you will agree does
nothing positive for your reputation.
So please everyone, at least agree to disagree, and get on with
developement, for which your users will be grateful.
Thanks for your time, and thanks for your work, ALL of you.
--
You are what you forgot about. Revenge is a beer served warm.
|[{(<=--=>)}]|David Charles Todd, tHE mAN wITH tHREE fIRST nAMES|[{(<=--=>)}]|
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